USA

The Bard in the Badlands – Hell is empty and the devils are here

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

What happens when the robots, androids, replicants, call them what you will, feel emotion and sentiment, establish relationships, and recall memories, like humans do? When the boss starts disrupting the storylines, the ‘droids go off-script, think their own thoughts, and live their own “lives”. And lo! bad things happen! Before you know it, robots start quoting the Bard of Avon.

Westworld addresses some disturbing concepts. The mechanical and moral arcs of Artificial Intelligence. The ethical implications of an escapist theme park where well-heeled guests indulge in gamer-like fantasies, some of which that would see them jailed in their mainstream, material lives – play poker in a saloon (and cheat), go with a whore (of either sex), ride out with a posse, witness or even participate in a gunfight – and rape and pillage through a simulacrum Wild West, killing and fucking whomever they liked.

And then there are the hosts, the oh-so-realistic (“are you one of them” is a question often asked by a fascinated and impressed guest) robots, androids, cyborgs, replicants – call them what you will depending on your favourite sci-if film – who play out pre-written, sometimes derivative, mostly anodyne, but often perverse storylines, with added code for improvisations to move the guests’ adventures along, and for prohibitions on the use of knives, axes and firearms, because management mandates that whist guests might get injured, by accident or for the thrill of it, none must get themselves killed.

.

The hosts are men, women, and children – cowboys and indians, bar-tenders and whores, soldiers and civilians, bandits and desperados. There cyber horses, cattle, dogs, wolves and snakes, even. They are the entertainers, the surrogates, the fantasy-toys, the extras in the guests’ real-time fables (and yet, you never a tourist raise a camera or a cell-phone on this unforgettable dream holiday).  And they are also the victims. Assaulted, bludgeoned, raped, massacred, and brought off-set for repair, maintenance, and software enhancements and updates designed to give the guests improved service. Periodically, their memories are erased, and new roles assigned, and they re-enter the vast, geographically and scenically amazing park with new clothes, new skills, and new storylines.

 Until one day…

Most people of a certain age in the western world may recall the violent finale of the 1971 film Westworld starring Yul Brynner as the violent and relentless Man in Black. And yes, this is where Westworld Redux is taking us.

What happens when these robots, androids, replicants, call them what you will, feel emotion, and sentiment, establish relationships , and recall memories, like humans do? When they succumb to thatvold Pinochio syndrome. When the boss, played by that redoubtable chameleon Anthony Hopkins, starts disrupting the storylines, the ‘droids go off-script, think their own thoughts, and live their own “lives”. And lo! bad things happen. Before you know it, robots start quoting the Bard of Avon:

By most mechanical and dirty hand. Rouse up revenge from ebon den…  Henry IV Part 1

These violent delights have violent ends.  Romeo and Juliet

I shall have such revenges on you. The things I will do, what they are, yet I know not. But they will be the terrors of the earth”.  King Lear

When we are born, we cry that we are come. To this great stage of fools. King Lear

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come. Hamlet

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!  The Tempest

I am bound, upon a wheel of fire, that my own tears do scald like molten lead. King Lear

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner writes in Slate Magazine:

“Westworld suggests that once these replicants, who yearn like some feral Pinocchio to be real boys and girls start quoting Shakespeare, they can break free from their oppressors’ sadistic games. But Shakespeare’s lines aren’t the antidote to Wild West exploitation. They supplied the script for manifest destiny”.

He continues:

“What these portentous allusions don’t seem to register, however, is the actual role that Shakespeare played in the American West…(Settlers) performed Shakespeare from Missouri to San Francisco in the Wild Frontier. Gold-miners queued up to land a plum part in favorites like the bloodthirsty Macbeth or Richard III. “Traveling through America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.” An army scout in Wyoming traded a yoke of oxen for an edition of Shakespeare; mines named Cordelia, Ophelia, and Desdemona dotted the Colorado mountains. More recent evocations of this period link the Bard to territorial conquest…When the United States prepared to defend the newly annexed state of Texas from Mexico in 1846, Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in an army production of Othello in Corpus Christi”.

Daniel’s source for this is an enthralling, very well-researched article in The Smithsonian by American author Jennifer Lee Carrell, which I reproduce in full below. Resident in Tucson Arizona, and a teacher and historical author by trade, she is well placed geographically and well-credentialed academically to tell the tale of How the Bard Won the West.

Westworld references not just Shakespeare, by the way. There are literary, music and art motifs aplenty, and if this alternative universe seems at times to resemble a frontier Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that is because it is meant to. One character quotes Alice verbatim: “Dear dear, how queer everything is today and yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night.” And another, the Mad Hatter: “If I had a world of my own everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t”. In Westworld’s vicarious and mechanical dreamland, things are constantly changing. Time Magazine has published a handy guide to Westworld’s many references.

Android Armistice

Westworld is not the first post-modern western to tread the boards, however.

Over a decade ago, there was David Milch’s Deadwood – in my opinion is one of the most enthralling and memorable of historical dramas. Set in the lawless west of the eighteen seventies, it ticks all the parental guidance boxes: substances, sex, strong language, and that ambivalent catch-all “adult themes”. As a bonus, the acting is superb, the characterization likewise, and the script, inspired and inspiring,  traversing from the sacred to the (very) profane. It borrows heavily from the raw vernacular and from language that channels Shakespeare, Milton and Melville.

Deadwood offers its myriad gamblers, pimps, whores, miners, cowboys, carpet baggers, and fortune seekers only the lowest forms of entertainment (not counting the inevitable bar-room piano (in Westworld, there is an automatic player-piano (of course).  Enter stage east,  Brian Cox’s flamboyantly eloquent Jack Langrishe and his disparate troupe of travelling players, seeking both financial opportunity and a chance to bring art and culture to the barbarians. He converts an old schoolhouse recently refurbished as a boutique brothel into a theatre, and opens it with a surreal and surprising amateur night, a come-all-ye music hall that that brings out many of the lights that the townsfolk have been hiding under their bushels. Its an all-singing, all-dancing jamboree with jugglers, plate-spinners, axe-balancers, and a dance of the several veils. Keeping faith with Carrell’s thesis, Jack Langrishe is based on an actual Deadwood historical theatre owner and comic. Langrishe and his sad band of thespians are naturally on intimate terms with the bard.

I’ve recently rewatched Deadwood right through for the umpteenth time – and it’s as captivating as ever. Each viewing reveals new insights and gems of speeches but there are many I’ve missed due to the aural overload of its exquisite script. Like this one from Act 4 Scene 1 of King Lear. Gloucester, blinded by his enemies, encounters his son Edgar, disguised as a mad man, on a barren plain. Not recognizing his lad, he and asks that he guide him to a high place from whence he can leap and end it all. It doesn’t quite come to that in the play – there’s many twist and turn before he meets his maker. Langrishe and dying old friend and mentor Chesterton are at last taking their leave of each other, there is no other outcome.

Chesterton: Hmm. (Chesterton seems to be pretty much out of it. Jack is looking sad)
Jack: Dost thou know Dover? There is a cliff whose high unbending head looks fearfully on the confined deep. Bring me back to the brim of it, and from that place… I shall no leading need. Here’s the fly tower. If you mount up, take firm a rail in each hand. (He pauses and looks at his friend, who is motionless) I’ll boost your bum, darling.
Chesterton: Here’s the place. (he seems to be fading away)
Jack: How fearful and dizzy it is to cast one’s eyes so low.
Chesterton: Set me where you stand. Let go my hand. (Jack slips his hand out of his friend’s grasp.)
Jack: You’re now within a foot.
Chesterton: Line. L-line. (He seems to have died)
Jack: Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. (We see motion in the shadows, the other members of the troupe appear) He’s gone. (Bellegarde puts his hand on the old man’s shoulder and slips off his glasses.)

G. Know’st thou the way to Dover?
E. Both stile and gate, horseway and footpath.
Poor Tom hath been scared out of his good wits.
Bless thee, good man’s son, from the foul fiend.
Five fiends have been in Poor Tom at once: of lust,
as Obidicut; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness;
Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; ⌜Flibbertigibbet,⌝
of mopping and mowing, who since possesses
chambermaids and waiting women. So, bless
thee, master …
G. Dost thou know Dover?
E: Ay, master.
G.There is a cliff, whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confinèd deep.
Bring me but to the very brim of it,
And I’ll repair the misery thou dost bear
With something rich about me. From that place
I shall no leading need.
E. Give me thy arm.
Poor Tom shall lead thee.

Milch claims in an interview for American Heritage, The  Man Who Made Deadwood, that profanity functioned as a kind of social equalizer, a way for people from all walks of life to communicate with one another. “Many of them might have been illiterate, but they knew the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and that’s what shaped the way they thought and the way they expressed themselves.” Regardless of whether they were familiar with the works of Shakespeare, it is telling that Milch brings up the influence since almost every review of Deadwood compares it to Shakespeare.

Read and enjoy Carrell’s intriguing piece. Watch and be captivated by Westworld and Deadwood. And see also:  Brogan Morris’ Deadwood’s Critique of the Rich and Powerful Matters Even More in 2016, and Ethan Tussey’s piece of the language of Deadwood in Critical Commons, and Deadwwod – An Introduction in Unaffiliated Critic.

See other posts on American history from In That Howling Infinite: Blind Willie McTell – Bob Dylan’s Americana and Rebel Yell.

 

How the Bard  Won the West

By Jennifer Lee Carrell, Smithsonian, August, 1998

Sometime late in 1863, a tall, thin man rode out of an Army camp in the Wyoming territory and headed across the prairie. He was just under 60 years old, one of the greatest scouts and Indian fighters, a man from whom Kit Carson took orders. It was the wild places that Jim Bridger liked best; following strange tales into the unknown, he was probably the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake. At that moment, however, he was headed toward people, not away from them. Not too far off, the Oregon Trail snaked westward across the landscape. Traffic had dwindled by 1863, but this trail still ranked as a highway by the standards of men such as Bridger; you could hardly follow its hard-packed earth so much as a day without running across somebody. That was exactly why Bridger was headed there.

He was looking to do some trading. What he had to offer was a yoke of cattle, then worth about $125, or almost a month of his wages as an Army scout. What Bridger wanted, and what he thought he could get from a wagon train, was a book. And not just any book, but the book that an Army officer had told him was the best ever written. He wanted Shakespeare.

Bridger’s quest might sound unlikely, but all over the American West trappers, cowboys, miners, outlaws, proper ladies, prostitutes and Army officers regarded Shakespeare with a familiar ease and delight that might astonish the average American in the late 20th century. The history of the West, in fact, is a history of playing Shakespeare, of playing with Shakespeare, in what now may seem peculiar places and surprising ways.

The Oregon Trail

Bridger, for instance, got what he wanted: someone, going west in wagons that could hold only the most necessary and precious possessions, had brought along a volume of Shakespeare. Out on the prairie, that someone judged the book not quite so precious as a yoke of cattle. For the additional sum of $40 per month, Bridger hired a German boy to read his new book to him. For though he could speak English, French, Spanish and a dozen Indian languages, and though he could draw, freehand, highly accurate maps of the West, Bridger could not read.

He could listen, however, and listen he did. Bridger was already well known as a storyteller. Because he sometimes embellished the already extraordinary natural marvels of the West, and because writers and others made up wild tales and attributed them to him, he also had a growing though undeserved reputation as a liar. That winter, however, he added to his repertoire: from then on he could quote Shakespeare at length. The prospect of an old mountain man spouting Shakespeare now seems more fantastic than the same man spinning tales about salt lakes, glass mountains and hot- and cold-running rivers. Nonetheless, Bridger came to know Shakespeare’s cadences of speech so well that his own speech could slide through the poet’s rhythms, especially the insults. One of Bridger’s tricks was to insert his own oaths into Shakespeare, so that his audience did not know where the playwright stopped and the mountain man began.

In search of the places that Bridger and others once took Shakespeare, I find myself heading off the main roads, and then off-road altogether. Up in Colorado’s Gunnison County, I wind north through a wide valley filled with quaking aspen and tall trumpet flowers. Passing beneath the mountain whose sky-hungry spires gave the town of Gothic its name, the road bounces up over a pass and creeps into a darker forest of pine and spruce. This is country that in summer is still best covered on horseback.

But I am horseless, so when I give up on the car, I set off on foot. For somewhere up here, say century-old documents that briefly sound more like The Hobbit than legal records, “at the foot of the Treasure Mountain” there lies a mine called Shakespeare.

Treasure Mountain, Colorado

It was not a spectacularly rich mine, but it was respectable. Two years after it was located in 1879, the last of its original owners, John Blewett, sold out for $30,000. Blewett may have revered the Bard, but he didn’t spend all his free time reading. Having sold his rights to the mine, he promptly made his way down to Gothic and won a shooting contest.

The name is scattered all over the West: “Shakespeare” names a town and a canyon in New Mexico, a mountaintop in Nevada, a reservoir in Texas and a glacier in Alaska. But it was the miners who most often staked Shakespeare to the earth. Nineteenth-century claims called Shakespeare dotted the landscape of Colorado and spilled over into Utah. The mines that still scar Western mountains now seem a curious honorific for a great poet. Yet, Shakespeare takes his place among heroes and sweethearts.

In their quest for distinctive names, the miners delved into the Bard’s stories. Colorado sports mines called Ophelia, Cordelia and Desdemona. There is even a “Timon of Athens,” revealing that some prospectors dug into remote corners of Shakespeare as well as remote corners of North America, because Timon is one of Shakespeare’s least-known plays. It is a fitting name for a mine, though, because the play’s hero — a mad, bankrupt misanthrope — accidentally discovers “yellow, glittering, precious gold” while digging in the forest for roots.

I did not, in the end, find the valley where modern survey maps and ancient mining records suggest the remains of Blewett’s mine lie. Far to the south, however, I did find an entire town called Shakespeare. By 1879, Ralston, New Mexico, was short on respectability, having been the site of a diamond-mine hoax that had produced a bank failure, a suicide and substantial losses for investors. In April of that year, therefore, Col. William G. Boyle renamed the town Shakespeare. He already owned the Stratford Hotel, and Main Street was familiarly known as Avon Avenue; soon after, Boyle organized the Shakespeare Gold and Silver Mining and Milling Company. The townsmen joined the trend, organizing the Shakespeare Guards to defend the place against Apache raids.

Shakespeare was more than a name to miners, however. During the gold rush, playgoing had a prominent place among the drinking, gambling and carrying on that was the miners’ usual relief from hard and dangerous work. From Colorado to California, theaters that played Shakespeare more than any other playwright perched just across the street, or sometimes right upstairs, from the saloons and gambling halls that were sometimes brothels as well. All over the West, towns built elaborate gilt-and-plush theaters grandiosely called opera houses. A few of these jewel-box theaters still survive in former boomtowns such as Nevada City, California; Tombstone, Arizona; and Aspen, Central City, and Leadville, Colorado. When theaters weren’t available people gathered in saloons, hotel hallways or even tents to watch actors play on stages made of packing boxes or boards laid across billiard tables and lit by kerosene lanterns; in Calaveras County, California, actors performed on the stump of a giant redwood.

The greatest actors from the Eastern Seaboard played to packed houses on these stages. Edwin Booth (elder brother of John Wilkes Booth) played his first Shakespearean leads on the magnificent and makeshift stages of California.

From left to right: John Wilkes, Edwin, and their father Junius Brutus Booth in Julius Caesar, 1864

That this caliber of actor regularly appeared in such venues might have been for adventure’s sake, but it was also partly because there was fame and wealth to be found among the miners. In the 1850s, top actors could earn up to $3,000 a week in San Francisco; the best theaters in the East were offering only a tenth as much. But it was up in the boisterous camps that the actors struck gold. In places with names like Rattlesnake, Rough and Ready, Git-up-and-Git and Hangtown, theater tickets were bought with gold dust, and cheering miners tossed nuggets and bags of gold dust onto the stage at curtain call.

The first people to carry Shakespeare into the West were trappers, who threaded their way into the Rockies along the rivers on their quest for beaver. Mountain men were legendary for gathering around campfires to tell bear stories both hair-raising and hilarious. According to the recollections of trappers Joe Meek and Bill Hamilton, however, though they might indeed be swapping bear stories, they might just as well be sharing a little Shakespeare. Or they might even be doing both: after all, the Bard’s most infamous stage direction, from The Winter’s Tale, is “Exit pursued by a bear.”

Alfred Jacob Miller, Moonlight — Camp Scene, 1858-60, Watercolor on paper
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

On the frontier, Shakespeare was not “Art” to be adored in silent, solitary reading; Shakespeare was a set of stories to be told aloud, language to be tasted, toyed with, tossed about over a campfire. Bridger is a case in point: after he bought his precious book, it never seems to have occurred to him to learn to read. What he wanted from the book was specifically what was in it. Like Bridger, other Westerners might get their Shakespeare out of books, but in books they did not let him stay. The 19th century was an age of oral storytelling and public speaking; if Shakespeare was taught at all, it was taught as oratory and recitation — then parts of the most basic schooling. Since Shakespeare was seen and heard more than read, no one needed much, if any, formal education to have at least a passing acquaintance with the works. Montana rancher Philip Ashton Rollins said that many ranch owners brought Shakespeare west with them. It was not unusual to see “a bunch of cowboys sitting on their spurs listening with absolute silence and concentration while somebody read aloud.” Further, Shakespeare was popular because of the poetry, not in spite of it. After listening to the blood and thunder “dogs of war” speech in Julius Caesar, one top hand told Rollins, “Gosh! That fellow Shakespeare could sure spill the real stuff. He’s the only poet I ever seen what was fed on raw meat.”

Roundup Camp, Wyoming, 1880s

Among Westerners, the most popular Shakespearean plays were the tragedies and epic histories, with Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet heading the list. Westerners, however, were not silenced into tongue-tied awe by high tragedy. Like Bridger — who was once heard to say that Falstaff (or “Mr. Full-stuff”) liked beer a little too much for his own good and might have been better off with bourbon — cowboys, outlaws, miners and trappers embraced Shakespeare. They brought it to life, retelling it in a mix of remembered poetry and the teller’s own salty language.

Along with the enthusiasm came irreverence. It was common in 19th-century American theater to follow the main play, no matter how profound, with a comic song, a dance, and finally a farce in which the principal actors often reappeared. In Denver in 1859, a troupe followed Richard III with a polka and a farce called Luck in a Name; in San Francisco, King Lear was once followed by a dancing horse named Adonis. Sometimes the kind of mischief that led Bridger to alter Shakespeare’s oaths took over the stage completely. Audiences loved farces with titles like Hamlet and Egglet and Julius Sneezer, and burlesque Shakespeare was popular minstrel fare.

Westerners also delighted in creative casting. In Army camps, all-male performances were not uncommon. In Texas on the eve of the Mexican War, Lieut. Ulysses S. Grant was drafted into the role of Desdemona because he supposedly looked the part. Before opening night, however, his superiors had to send off to New Orleans for a real woman, because Grant failed to show “the proper sentiment.” Great actresses playing Shakespearean heroes in serious productions were ticket-selling curiosities. The women’s success led to the brief vogue of having little girls play the major tragic roles; thus did Anna Maria Quinn, age 6, play Hamlet to a mostly adult male audience at San Francisco’s Metropolitan Theatre in 1854. In Deer Lodge, Montana, on the other hand, miners and cowboys were treated to the spectacle of an actress playing Juliet with an imitation Romeo: a “blockhead in every respect” reported one witness delighted by the wooden dummy outfitted with wig and red cambric gown, and even more by the parodic performance that followed.

Because Shakespeare — as story or poetry or theater — was shared by so many people, it became a kind of imaginative meeting place. The readings organized by Bridger, for example, brought together an illiterate mountain man, a German boy and the well-educated Army officer who had first recommended the Bard. In the theater, there was no assumption that Shakespeare should be delivered in the plummy tones of the British upper class; audiences flocked to hear their favorite actors play Shakespeare in English heavily laden with German, Polish, French and Italian accents in addition to regional British, American and Australian inflections.

For all the intensity of their love affair with Shakespeare, Westerners had no monopoly on it. In 1849, what is still one of the bloodiest riots in American history broke out in New York City — over styles of acting Shakespeare. A vigorous style was said to be democratic and American while more cerebral acting was said to be aristocratic and English. Enraged by a supposedly elitist performance of Macbeth, a crowd of 10,000 surged outside the Astor Place Opera House (Smithsonian, October 1985). When the mob turned from hurling insults to hurling paving stones, the New York militia opened fire, shooting directly into the crowd at least 22 people died and 150 others were wounded.

The Astor Place Riot, New York City, 1849

As the frontier straggled westward, the differences that had chafed in crowded New York were stretched out across the continent; Westerners favored flamboyant acting while disdaining polished elegance as snobbish and Eastern. Less than a year after the Astor Place Riot, Shakespeare arrived along with the forty-niners in the California goldfields, and by 1856, the Californians, too, were brawling over Shakespeare. In the West, though, it was not politics but the combination of characters acting badly and actors acting badly that provoked riots.

At a Sacramento performance of Richard III, the audience began to get restive in the face of Richard’s mounting evil and the actor’s obvious incompetence. When at last Richard stabbed one of his victims in the back, the audience began tossing any and all handy garbage onto the stage: bags of flour and soot, old vegetables, a dead goose. At the request of the stage manager, the audience allowed Richard to reappear, but when he placed his sword in the hands of Lady Anne during the wooing scene, “one half the house, at least, asked that [the sword] might be plunged in his body,” the Sacramento Unionreported. The actor was finally driven from the stage by a “well directed pumpkin… with still truer aim, a potato relieved him of his cap, which was left upon the field of glory, among the cabbages.”

In their noisy displays of pleasure and displeasure, Western audiences preserved and even heightened an exuberant tradition of theatergoing dating back to the Elizabethan audiences that Shakespeare knew. They expected to enter into the spirit of play, and the same enthusiasm that could produce showers of either rotten vegetables or gold dust also provoked, at less frenzied moments, stamping, cheering, whistling and hooting, as well as quips and running commentary on the play, the players and the production.

This freewheeling audience participation had once been common all over America, but in the late 19th century Shakespearean theater was fast becoming an elite and stately affair in the East and in Europe. Western audiences preserved longer their right to play during the play. Appearing as Othello in 1886, Tommaso Salvini was so disturbed by the laughter and popping of champagne corks coming from “Silver King” Horace Tabor’s personal box in Denver’s Tabor Grand Opera House that he sent a note up during intermission threatening to stop the play if things in Box A did not quiet down. “My theater is a playhouse as much for the audience as for the actors,” Tabor reportedly bellowed back. “If that Eyetalian wants to pray,” Tabor fumed, “let him go to church.”

The Tabor Grand Opera House, Denver, Colorado. Photo by J. Collier

Nonetheless, changing attitudes eventually traveled westward; Lawrence Levine of George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, has speculated that Shakespeare’s fall from popularity in America was caused by large-scale shifts in ideas about what is entertainment and what is art. When Shakespeare stopped being story and began to be art, it began to seem distant; when accuracy became more important than entertainment, it became boring; and when the language of Shakespeare ceased to be commonly heard aloud, it began to seem difficult. Beyond doubt, however, changing attitudes toward Shakespeare have resulted in what now looks like a paradox: Shakespeare’s popularity in the American West dwindled as the West was settled and ceased to be wild.

Shakespeare has not, however, disappeared from the West without a trace: it still shapes the myth of what we think the West was, or ought to have been. The novel that established the genre of the western, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (published in 1902), features an aloof hero who is a dead shot and a deeply honorable man. He is also prone to quoting Shakespeare; the poet’s lyricism captivates him. “The singing masons building roofs of gold,” he says at one point, quoting from King Henry V. “Ain’t that a fine description of bees a-workin’?…Puts ’em right before yu’, and is poetry without bein’ foolish.” Following the novelists, Hollywood, too, has borrowed from Shakespeare in shaping our idea of the West that was. The film Broken Lance (1954), for instance, tells King Lear in the guise of a western, while Jubal (1956) reshapes Othello.

 

Today up in Leadville, you can, as I did, climb onto the stage of the Tabor Opera House and stand in front of the painted scenery that once backed Romeo and Juliet. Facing the plush seats that curve toward you, you can let your voice roll out into the hushed and waiting darkness on the cadences of Shakespeare. In the ghost town of Shakespeare, you can, as I did, duck out of the New Mexico sun into the shade of the Stratford Hotel’s long narrow dining room, where the desert wind will send the fine silt of crumbling adobe drifting over your skin and through your hair; there you can listen to the stories that the town’s present owners, Janaloo Hill and Manny Hough, have spent a lifetime collecting from old-timers.

The Stratford Hotel in Shakespeare, New Mexico. Photo by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Yet Shakespeare is more than a ghost in the West. After the Bard ceased to be part of their everyday life, Westerners began to pioneer the Shakespeare festival. Every summer tourists descend upon the towns of Ashland, Oregon, and Cedar City, Utah, to gorge themselves on Shakespeare brilliantly brought to life in faux Elizabethan theaters set down among the forests of the Pacific Northwest and the red rock canyons of the Southwest. Scattered over the West as well are productions aimed more at local audiences, such as the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder and the Grand Canyon Shakespeare Festival in Flagstaff, Arizona. In Boulder, you can spend a summer’s evening picnicking on a wide lawn and then wander into a Greek-style amphitheater hewn out of local red stone. As the sky deepens to sapphire edged by the strange, stark shapes of the Flatiron Mountains that loom behind the set, you can be swept away to some far country on the tide of Shakespeare, sharing the laughter of a thousand Coloradans as Beatrice baits Benedick, or shivering with the hiss of indrawn breath as Romeo forever drinks poison a scant moment to early to see that Juliet still breathes.

Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Boulder

But here, as I listen to the crowds dispersing downhill through the trees, the laughter and the sorrow are tinged with surprise: that Shakespeare is here, that it is so good, that they have enjoyed it so much. In the frontier West, the fact that Shakespeare tells good stories, and that those stories should be told well in the West, was no surprise at all — at least not to Westerners. From Jim Bridger, to the forty-niners, to the cowboys, the old wanderers would hardly recognize anything in the modern cities that rise on the plains and mountains, strung out like glittering beads along the Interstate freeways. Yet they might recognize and be glad of one thing on such a summer night: Shakespeare still plays well under Western skies.

© 1998 by Jennifer Lee Carrell
All Rights Reserved

Originally published in the Smithsonian, vol. 29, number 5 (August, 1998): 98-107.

Back Story and Further Reading

Image of Shakespeare in a cowboy hat courtesy of Northwest University Drama, Seattle

Yiddish – the language that won’t go away

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The past and present of a language that refuses to disappear. An iluminating post from Matt Adler’s excellent blog planting Roots Bearing Fruits.

Matt Adler - מטע אדלר's avatarPlanting Roots Bearing Fruits

One might be surprised to hear this, but Yiddish lives in Israel- and not just among Hasidim.  Yiddish is the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews like me.  Before someone says something stupid, let me clarify something- Yiddish is NOT a “mixture of German and Hebrew”.  It is also not only a Hasidic language- it has existed for at least a thousand years as a distinct language, whereas Hasidism has been around for about 400.  On the eve of the Holocaust, 13 million Jews- socialists, communists, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Hasidim, secularists- spoke the language.

Yiddish is an archaeology of the Jewish people and linguistic proof of our ties to the Land of Israel.  About 2000 years ago, Romans expelled Jews from Israel and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Jews who weren’t executed were expelled or enslaved.  Many eventually made their way to other parts of the Roman Empire, where their Aramaic…

View original post 1,716 more words

Why we’ve never stopped loving the Beatles

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

I have always wanted to write a tribute to the Beatles, but I can’t better Australian journalist and author David Leser’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on Nov 25-26 2017.

So here it is in full, pictures included: 

I was 6½ years old when I saw the Beatles perform Love Me Do on Britain’s Granada Television. Like anyone old enough to remember that moment in 1962, I was thunderstruck – by the harmonies, the haircuts and the wavering harmonica that John Lennon was playing.

Our generation had never heard anything like it – not until we heard Please Please Me, and then I Saw Her Standing There, and then From Me to You, and then She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Can’t Buy Me Love, I Feel Fine, Ticket to Ride, Help …

They just kept coming didn’t they? One glorious foot-stomping pop classic after another. Songs that took us to places of head-shaking ecstasy in less than 2½ minutes, blending influences of rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm ‘n’ blues, rockabilly, skiffle and – later – reggae, folk, country and western, Indian, psychedelia and string quartets.

Songs that started with choruses. Songs that went from minor falls to major lifts. Songs with beautiful bridges and mysterious openings, like that indescribable shimmering announcement of A Hard Day’s Night, or the 16-minute medley that concluded Abbey Road, their final recorded album. (And, yes, Abbey Road was always my favourite, even though Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper and The White Albumcould always ambush me with their brilliant innovations.)

Songs that were arrows aimed at the collective heart of nations. Songs that captured the tempo and temper of a generation. Songs that saw two geniuses – John Lennon and Paul McCartney – hunting as one pair to become the greatest songwriting duo in history – and this before George Harrison finally emerged from their oversized shadow.

 Songs that came to represent arguably the greatest outpouring of melody from one source since Mozart. Not scores of good songs. Hundreds of great songs that are still being analysed, deconstructed and, of course, played today.
I was eight when the Beatles came to Australia in 1964 and 300,000 people poured onto the streets of Adelaide to welcome them. I had photos of the Beatles all over my bedroom wall (actually I still have photos all over my wall, although not my bedroom) and I remember crying when my mother went to see them at the Sydney Stadium and told me I couldn’t go.

It was as if I’d lost a member of my own family, which in a way I had; only to be repeated 21 years later when George Harrison died from cancer.

The Beatles were the stuff that dreams and screams were made of and like millions of boys my age, I learnt to play guitar and sing because of them. I fell in love to the Beatles. And with the Beatles – George first, then Paul, then John, then George all over again.

And, truth is, this love has never deserted me – nor many in my generation – no matter how far we’ve travelled from their phenomenon, in time and space. Of course there were other loves too:  the Beatles’ great rivals – the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream; the Beatles’ successors – Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads and Fleetwood Mac; the Jewish songwriters – Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon; the androgynous ground breakers Bowie, Michael Jackson and Prince; not to mention Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Van Morrison, Cat Stephens and Bruce Springsteen. And all this well before we’d even entered the ’90s.

Such a long list of musical loves, but never like that first great love. And now that Paul McCartney is about to arrive on our shores after a near 25 year absence it feels appropriate to reflect on why this should be so, notwithstanding the millions of words already penned about the Greatest Band the World has Ever Known.

 I remember the moment as though it were yesterday – standing in a hospital corridor waiting to see my sick grandmother – as a woman in the room next door yelled to her deaf mother: ‘Did you hear mum? A madman just shot John Lennon.’

It was always about the music, but the multiple stories that attached themselves to the Beatles were no less compelling. Two motherless Liverpool teenagers, one caustic and witty (Lennon), the other conciliatory and hugely ambitious (McCartney), crossing their city one day to find the only person who could teach them the B7 chord.

And then, in the space of a few short years, forging a songwriting partnership that would see them, by early 1964, capturing 60 per cent of the American singles market, all top five positions on the Billboard’s singles and then, the following week, 14 of the top 100 US singles.

The Beatles give a press conference during their 1964 Australian tour.

They’d honed their stage craft during their Hamburg years (1960-62) when – among the bouncers, gangsters and sex workers of the notorious Reeperbahn​ – they’d performed 800 hours on stage, mostly on Preludin to stay awake, with show-stopping songs like Ray Charles’ What’d I Say.

They were the Rolling Stones before the Rolling Stones ever declared themselves a white Chicago blues band from London. For one thing, McCartney was a virtuoso musician who already knew his way around his left-handed guitar by the age of 15.

Son of a big band leader, he was steeped in famous music hall songs, while also imbued with the rock ‘n’ roll of Fats Domino, Little Richard, Elvis and Chuck Berry, not to mention the revival of British jazz, known as skiffle. Plus he could sing harmonies like an angel and he taught Lennon how to tune his guitar.

By the time he’d reached his prime, he was playing bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica, trumpet, recorder, oboe, flugelhorn, cello, violin, harpsichord, even the drums.

“Mr Lennon, is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world?” a breathless interviewer once asked John Lennon. “Ringo isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles,” Lennon replied.

It was an apocryphal story and it belied Ringo’s mastery – his rock-steady backbeat, his tom tom grooves, his syncopated propulsion, his languid rolls. As McCartney noted after Ringo first sat in for original drummer Pete Best: “I remember the moment standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.”

And then the so-called “Quiet Beatle” George Harrison, the lead guitarist, whose magnificent songwriting talent only began to fully reveal itself in 1968, four years after Beatlemania had swept the world, with songs like While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes the Sun and Something, the latter Frank Sinatra describing as “the greatest love song ever written.”

All great stories naturally have their tension and for the Beatles it was, firstly, the global hysteria that saw them turn their backs on live performances in favour of the studio. There they would end up penning their most brilliant songs – Day Tripper, We Can Work it Out, Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man, In My Life, Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby. And all this before they got around to Sgt Pepper, The White Album, Let it Be and Abbey Road.

It was the tension also of the Lennon-McCartney rivalry that, at its best, would see them trading song for song – Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever for McCartney’s Penny Lane; or lyric for lyric, as in Day in the Life, arguably their greatest collaboration.

At its worst, though, was the feud that finally erupted in the wake of manager Brian Epstein’s death from a drug overdose in 1967. That’s when, according to Lennon, McCartney began bossing the others around, trying to assert his will over the band.

Lennon was withering about McCartney in his final Rolling Stoneinterview, claiming McCartney was an “egomaniac” who’d tried to destroy – subconsciously – his [Lennon’s] songs. He also damned Yesterday, the most covered song in history, with faint praise.

“Well, we all know about Yesterday,” he said. “I have had so much accolade for Yesterday. That is Paul’s song, of course, and Paul’s baby. Well done. Beautiful … and I never wished I had written it.”

That final interview came three days before Lennon was gunned down and whatever chance there might have been of a true reconciliation between these old Liverpool friends ended with those five shots from Mark Chapman’s .38 Special revolver.

In the 47 years since the Beatles disbanded the question has often been asked: “Who was the better songwriter, Lennon or McCartney?” In 2014, an American documentary crew attempted to provide an answer after spending 10 years asking 550 musicians, directors and actors for their verdict.

One respondent said it was like choosing between your mum and dad. Another said it was like deciding between “food, shelter and clothing”. Lennon got the highest number of votes, although when US President Barack Obama awarded Paul McCartney the annual Gershwin prize for popular song in 2010 he described the now 75 year-old McCartney as “the most successful songwriter in history.

“He has composed hundreds of songs over the years – with John Lennon, with others, or on his own. Nearly 200 of those songs made the charts. Think about that. And stayed on the charts for a cumulative total of 32 years. His gifts have touched billions of lives.”

My friends and I are among those billions, although I might be the most hopelessly devoted of all. Once a month a few of us gather for a night of Beatles songs and I’ll be damned if I’m still not trying to work out the complex chord progressions and the high notes to their two and three-part harmonies.

My daughters, too, are fans, even though they were born two decades after it all ended. When each girl turned five I gave them the complete works of the Beatles with the instruction: “If you want to learn about songwriting and melody then listen to this.”

My elder daughter is now a singer-songwriter, my younger daughter a photographer. No prizes for guessing where we’ll be the night McCartney rolls back the years.Liverpool

See also: Recalling the Mersey Poets 

Tales of Yankee Power

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

When Jackson Browne released Lives in the Balance in 1986, critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, with the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragging the world into its vortex, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box. As Mark Twain noted, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.

Lives in the Balance was certainly a record for and of its times. Months before the Iran-contra scandal broke, Browne sang “I want to know who the men in the shadows are, I want to hear somebody asking them why. They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are but they’re never the ones to fight or to die”. After the “arms for hostages” deals hit the news, increased public awareness of the US’ secret and dirty war in Nicaragua inspired him to produce a video for the title track well after the album had passed its sales peak.

Lives in the Balance

The album’s other songs sustained the assault. Soldier of Plenty condemns America’s paternalism towards its poor Latin neighbours. Lawless Avenues, with poignant Spanish lyrics by Browne and Warren Zevon’s old friend and collaborator, Jorge Calderón, takes us down the mean streets of Latino Los Angeles before sending its young anti-hero off to die in America’s wars. In the driving and ironic For America, Browne regrets his prior indifference and qualifies his conflicted patriotism: “I have prayed for America; I was made for America; it’s in my blood and in my bones. By the dawn’s early light! by all I know is right, we’re going to reap what we have sown”. in Til I Go Down, he sings “I’m not gonna shut my eyes, I’ve already seen the lies on the faces of the men of war leading people to the killing floor”. This song aptly plays out the end credits of the harrowing academy award winning The Panama Deception  which documents the US’ invasion of that unfortunate country.

Browne was not the first mainstream singer and songwriter to address America’s long and troublesome relationship with its Latin American neighbours. In his 1983 Stealing Fire and 1984 World of Wonders, Canadian Bruce Cockburn gave us the tragically beautiful Nicaragua and Santiago Dawn and the visceral If I Had a Rocket Launcher. On The Trouble With Normal (1983), there is Tropic Moon, with its cinematic imagery, and the lyrically deceptive Waiting For The Moon. The theme is the same as Browne’s – the North’s intervention in the politics of the South – particularly when comes to financing and arming rogue militias and warlords, and pliable, vicious and corrupt dictators: “Yanqui wake up, don’t you see what you’re doing, trying to be the Pharoah of the West bringing nothing but ruin…You’re my friend but I say Yanqui go home!”

World of Wonders

In this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Uncle Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes: “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow – waiting for the moon to show. Might be a party, might be a war when those faceless sailors come ashore. Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.

Cockburn’s poetic muse trumps Browne’s agit-prop. These lines from Tropic Moon are nonpareil: “Away from the river, away from the smoke of the burning, fearful survivors, subject of government directives. One sad guitar note echoes off the wall of the jungle. Seen from the air they’re just targets with nowhere to run to”. And: “the light through the wire mesh plays on the president’s pistol like the gleam of bead of sweat in the flow of a candle”.

Very little has changed since Browne and Cockburn sang their Tales of Yankee Power. “But who are the ones that we call our friends? These governments killing their own? Or the people who finally can’t take anymore, and they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone. And there are lives in the balance; there are people under fire; there are children at the cannons; and there is blood on the wire”. And if you were one of those people, why wouldn’t you say “If I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate!“  As Cockburn sings in Santiago Dawn, “military thugs with their dogs and clubs spreading through the poblacion, hunting whoever has a voice, sure that everyone will run. They come in strong but its not that long before they know its not that easy to leave. To keep a million homeless down takes more than a strong arm up your sleeve”.

From Petrograd to Palestine, the story-line endures. The eighties were also the years of Russia’s Afghan quagmire, which led, ideologically if not geographically to the Chechen pogroms; and of a decade of bloodletting in Lebanon and in what in reality was the First Gulf War, that between Iran and Iraq. The Berlin Wall fell a few years before the events that drove these records, inspiring an outpouring of optimism as the countries of Eastern Europe broke free of the Soviet thrall. But this was not the Kumbaya moment that dreamers yearn for. Ensuing decades have seen a cartography of carnage: Bali and Beslan, Gaza and Grozny, Kabul and Kigali, Manhattan and Mogadishu, Sarajevo and Srebrenica.

We witness the anatomy of the new world economy in which millions of souls are on the move and everything can be traded for value. Bombs and babies, girls and guns, dollars, drugs and more besides. False prophets and bad dreams, broken promises and forlorn hopes, obscured visions and false horizons. “Many have perished, and more most surely will” – a line taken from WH Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world in transition between the wreckage of The Second World War and foreboding for the impending armed peace that was itself to endure for another forty five years.

It is sadly ironic that our present world is passing through another time of uneasy transition, between the fixed certainties of great power rivalry and the intractable and bloody asymmetrical conflicts of today.

Paul Hemphill, November 2015 © All rights reserved

Postscript

The other day, I was listening to Dire Straits’ excellent 1985 album Brothers in Arms, and was reminded that several of the songs thereon refer, albeit obliquely, to the “bush wars” of Central America, and possibly also, to the US and Soviet Union’s proxy wars in Southern Africa and Afghanistan. There is Ride Across the River, with its Latino mood, and the beautiful and haunting title track. And there is The Man’s Too Strong, a powerful indictment of the cult of “the big man” that plagues countries all over the world. How often have these tyrants “re-written history with my armies and my crooks. Invented memories. I did burn all the books”. And how often too have they been tolerated, supported and bankrolled by Uncle Sam and Comrade Ivan.

Somewhere In Syria

Author’s Note:

This post is very much a companion piece to my recent post, Allende’s Desk and Osama’s Pyjamas, another tale of Yankee power, and its subject matter echoes that of A Brief History of the Rise and the Fall of the West, and my poem  E Lucevan le Stelle.

Its story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978), played here by bluegrass wiz Tim O’Brien. As for the meaning of the Bobster’s song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning. Perhaps it deserves a post of its own one find day.

Listen to Lives in the Balance in full be clicking on the blue text. Amid the its hard-hitting political commentary sits In the Shape of a Heart, considered to be one of Browne’s finest love songs. Yet this too might be regarded as controversial with regard to what it may or may not imply about the doomed relationship it describes. But like “the ruby she wore on the chain around her neck”, it is a finely cut gem.

 

Otis Redding – an unfinished life

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Fifty years after his untimely death, a fabulous retrospective of the life, times, and musical greatness of Otis Redding:

Five magnificent years of an unfinished life. 

Singer-songwriter Otis Redding was born on September 9, 1941, in Dawson, Georgia. He became known the voice of soul music. Just as his career was taking off, he died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” became posthumously his first and only Number One hit in January 1968.

Also, In That Howling Infinite, read:  The Strange Death of Sam Cooke

 

Deep In The Heart of Texas

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

America’s Future is Texas, by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, July 10 &17, 2017:

“Texas is as politically divided as the rest of the U.S., but a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed its reputation for proud know-nothingism and retrograde thinking”.
This is a cracker. And a must-read for political junkies and all who are fascinated and frightened by the absurdities of recent US politics”.

This is a cracker. And a must-read for political junkies and all who are fascinated and frightened by the absurdities of recent US politics.

I haven’t enjoyed a lengthy American “fly on the wall” opinion piece since Variety despatched a writer to spend time with Lyndsay Lohan on the set of the The Canyons, her doomed porno-thriller (in case you are tempted, and it is indeed a hoot, there’s a link to it below).

Lawrence Wright’s piece reads like a tragicomical dystopian thriller, and indeed, Thomas Pynchon and Michael Chabon would find some great storylines here. His tale becomes increasingly surreal as the author charts the passions, policies and personalities that collude and collide in this chronicle of the recent legislative session of Texas’ State House.

It is full of stories short and tall, quips and quotes, and daring and dastardly deeds that would be hilarious and worthy of the best political satires if only they were not actually true! An Austin newspaper columnist recounts the story of an absconding representative: the police “tracked him to earth at his momma’s house, where he was found hiding in the stereo cabinet.” She added, “He always did want to be the Speaker.” A wannabe Republican candidate for the State Board of Education posts on Facebook that Barack Obama had worked as a male prostitute in his twenties: “That is how he paid for his drugs,” she reasons, (and) went on to assert that climate change is a “ridiculous hoax,” and that dinosaurs are extinct because the ones on Noah’s Ark were too young to reproduce”. Another representative tweets: “Top priority for Travis GOP: beautiful Big Titty women!!” A former governor once said of then presidential nominee, George H. W. Bush. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” She wore designer suits but picked her teeth, and she cleaned her fingernails with a Swiss Army knife. Successively opposing the placing of a Christmas manger scene in the state capitol, she said ““I’m afraid so…and it’s a shame, because it’s about the only time we ever had three wise men in the capitol.”

These are a selection of the more anodyne tales. Many others are downright scary, and one shakes one head in disbelief at what legislators and elected officials think and do. To bowdlerize the Bard, “what brave, bad world that has such people in it”.

“Texans…are hardly monolithic. The state is as politically divided as the rest of the nation. One can drive across it and be in two different states at the same time: FM Texas and AM Texas. FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR. It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California. AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas: Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads. Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu”.

Accordingly, Wright presses all the red (and blue) buttons that inspire, ignite and implode, delight, dismay and divide US politics and society, including in no particular order:

Abortion, gender and toilets. Obamacare, health insurance, and death panels (rememeber those?). Public schools, vouchers, and toilets. Gerrymandering, voter registration and electoral fraud. Lobbyists, political donations, and corruption. Immigration, Muslims, latinos, and sanctuary cities. Guns of all calibers, mass-shootings and pig hunting. Budgets, appropriations, and toilets. Donald Trump, the religious right, and the liberal menace – and, yes, toilets. You have to read the article if you want to understand how things always seem to come back to the rest room.

Maternal mortality rates (up), foster-care and child protection (down). The Poo Poo Choo Choo (really!), texting whilst driving, the right to say Happy Christmas instead of Happy Holiday, and a proposed law to fine masturbation outside of a woman’s parts or of a medical faculty – “an act against an unborn child, and failing to preserve the sanctity of life”. There’s the heroes : William Travis, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, and, naturally, the Alamo (see below). Famous Texans Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, and Kinky Friedman (and his band, the Texas Jewboys) get cameos, and Bruce Springsteen, a passing reference. But no Jimmy Webb or Galveston (Wichita is in Kansas in case you ask, and Phoenix is in Arizona), whilst Oklahoma is a refuge for dissenting Democrat legislators. And, whatever “they” do, “don’t California Texas!”

You will be amazed and horrified in equal measure as Lawrence Wright connects these dizzying dots. I never thought that politics could be so exciting. It makes the schoolyard bluster and the minor party shenanigans of our Australian Parliament seem like Children’s Play Time.

As we often say DownUnder: “Only in America Texas!”

And for some light relief (no pun intended) here’s Lindsay Lohan’s adventures in PornoLand.

Legends, Bibles, Plagues – Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

In Invisible Republic,  his masterful telling of the story behind “The Basement Tapes”, Greil Marcus, quotes Bob Dylan: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death”.

And this is precisely the theme of Dylan’s belated Nobel Lecture, a presentation that is in its style, scope and subject matter, a a laid-back, folksey spoken edition of the long-awaited and probably never to be written “Chronicles – Volume 2”.

Constructed around his précis of three of the many books that have influenced his writing over more than half a century – Moby-Dick, All Quiet of the Western Front, and The Odyssey – he recalls how he had mined the literary canon for myth and meaning, often uncertain and uncaring about how one ended and the other began. As he concludes:

“If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means”.

The full text of Bob’s lecture follows this recording:

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture

When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.

If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.

It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.

I hadn’t left home yet, but I couldn’t wait to. I wanted to learn this music and meet the people who played it. Eventually, I did leave, and I did learn to play those songs. They were different than the radio songs that I’d been listening to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to life. With radio songs, a performer might get a hit with a roll of the dice or a fall of the cards, but that didn’t matter in the folk world. Everything was a hit. All you had to do was be well versed and be able to play the melody. Some of these songs were easy, some not. I had a natural feeling for the ancient ballads and country blues, but everything else I had to learn from scratch. I was playing for small crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or on a street corner. You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to know what to play and when. Some songs were intimate, some you had to shout to be heard.

By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.

You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.

I had all the vernacular all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.

But I had something else as well. I had principals and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

President Barack Obama presents rock legend Bob Dylan with a Medal of Freedom, Tuesday, May 29, 2012, during a ceremony at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Moby-Dick is a fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab – captain of a ship called the Pequod – an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth. It’s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab’s got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now and again. You can anticipate what will happen.

The ship’s crew is made up of men of different races, and any one of them who sights the whale will be given the reward of a gold coin. A lot of Zodiac symbols, religious allegory, stereotypes. Ahab encounters other whaling vessels, presses the captains for details about Moby. Have they seen him? There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom. Says Moby is the incarnate of a Shaker god, and that any dealings with him will lead to disaster. He says that to Captain Ahab. Another ship’s captain – Captain Boomer – he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.

This book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience. A lot of Old Testament, biblical allegory: Gabriel, Rachel, Jeroboam, Bildah, Elijah. Pagan names as well: Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fleece, Starbuck, Stubb, Martha’s Vineyard. The Pagans are idol worshippers. Some worship little wax figures, some wooden figures. Some worship fire. The Pequod is the name of an Indian tribe.

Moby Dick is a seafaring tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, “Call me Ishmael.” Somebody asks him where he’s from, and he says, “It’s not down on any map. True places never are.” Stubb gives no significance to anything, says everything is predestined. Ishmael’s been on a sailing ship his entire life. Calls the sailing ships his Harvard and Yale. He keeps his distance from people.

A typhoon hits the Pequod. Captain Ahab thinks it’s a good omen. Starbuck thinks it’s a bad omen, considers killing Ahab. As soon as the storm ends, a crewmember falls from the ship’s mast and drowns, foreshadowing what’s to come. A Quaker pacifist priest, who is actually a bloodthirsty businessman, tells Flask, “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.”

Everything is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo Christian bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers. Greek mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of facts in this book, geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for coronation of royalty – noble families in the whaling industry. Whale oil is used to anoint the kings. History of the whale, phrenology, classical philosophy, pseudo-scientific theories, justification for discrimination – everything thrown in and none of it hardly rational. Highbrow, lowbrow, chasing illusion, chasing death, the great white whale, white as polar bear, white as a white man, the emperor, the nemesis, the embodiment of evil. The demented captain who actually lost his leg years ago trying to attack Moby with a knife.

We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.

Tashtego says that he died and was reborn. His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t saved by Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a non-Christian at that. He parodies the resurrection.

When Starbuck tells Ahab that he should let bygones be bygones, the angry captain snaps back, “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab, too, is a poet of eloquence. He says, “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run.” Or these lines, “All visible objects are but pasteboard masks.” Quotable poetic phrases that can’t be beat.

Finally, Ahab spots Moby, and the harpoons come out. Boats are lowered. Ahab’s harpoon has been baptized in blood. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it. Next day, he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat again. On the third day, another boat goes in. More religious allegory. He has risen. Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.

Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.

Moby-Dick

All Quiet on the Western Front was another book that did. All Quiet on the Western Front is a horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.

Day after day, the hornets bite you and worms lap your blood. You’re a cornered animal. You don’t fit anywhere. The falling rain is monotonous. There’s endless assaults, poison gas, nerve gas, morphine, burning streams of gasoline, scavenging and scabbing for food, influenza, typhus, dysentery. Life is breaking down all around you, and the shells are whistling. This is the lower region of hell. Mud, barbed wire, rat-filled trenches, rats eating the intestines of dead men, trenches filled with filth and excrement. Someone shouts, “Hey, you there. Stand and fight.”

Who knows how long this mess will go on? Warfare has no limits. You’re being annihilated, and that leg of yours is bleeding too much. You killed a man yesterday, and you spoke to his corpse. You told him after this is over, you’ll spend the rest of your life looking after his family. Who’s profiting here? The leaders and the generals gain fame, and many others profit financially. But you’re doing the dirty work. One of your comrades says, “Wait a minute, where are you going?” And you say, “Leave me alone, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then you walk out into the woods of death hunting for a piece of sausage. You can’t see how anybody in civilian life has any kind of purpose at all. All their worries, all their desires – you can’t comprehend it.

More machine guns rattle, more parts of bodies hanging from wires, more pieces of arms and legs and skulls where butterflies perch on teeth, more hideous wounds, pus coming out of every pore, lung wounds, wounds too big for the body, gas-blowing cadavers, and dead bodies making retching noises. Death is everywhere. Nothing else is possible. Someone will kill you and use your dead body for target practice. Boots, too. They’re your prized possession. But soon they’ll be on somebody else’s feet.

There’s Froggies coming through the trees. Merciless bastards. Your shells are running out. “It’s not fair to come at us again so soon,” you say. One of your companions is laying in the dirt, and you want to take him to the field hospital. Someone else says, “You might save yourself a trip.” “What do you mean?” “Turn him over, you’ll see what I mean.”

You wait to hear the news. You don’t understand why the war isn’t over. The army is so strapped for replacement troops that they’re drafting young boys who are of little military use, but they’re draftin’ ‘em anyway because they’re running out of men. Sickness and humiliation have broken your heart. You were betrayed by your parents, your schoolmasters, your ministers, and even your own government.

The general with the slowly smoked cigar betrayed you too – turned you into a thug and a murderer. If you could, you’d put a bullet in his face. The commander as well. You fantasize that if you had the money, you’d put up a reward for any man who would take his life by any means necessary. And if he should lose his life by doing that, then let the money go to his heirs. The colonel, too, with his caviar and his coffee – he’s another one. Spends all his time in the officers’ brothel. You’d like to see him stoned dead too. More Tommies and Johnnies with their whack fo’ me daddy-o and their whiskey in the jars. You kill twenty of ‘em and twenty more will spring up in their place. It just stinks in your nostrils.

You’ve come to despise that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this torture chamber. All around you, your comrades are dying. Dying from abdominal wounds, double amputations, shattered hipbones, and you think, “I’m only twenty years old, but I’m capable of killing anybody. Even my father if he came at me.”

Yesterday, you tried to save a wounded messenger dog, and somebody shouted, “Don’t be a fool.” One Froggy is laying gurgling at your feet. You stuck him with a dagger in his stomach, but the man still lives. You know you should finish the job, but you can’t. You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.

Months pass by. You go home on leave. You can’t communicate with your father. He said, “You’d be a coward if you don’t enlist.” Your mother, too, on your way back out the door, she says, “You be careful of those French girls now.” More madness. You fight for a week or a month, and you gain ten yards. And then the next month it gets taken back.

All that culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom – Plato, Aristotle, Socrates – what happened to it? It should have prevented this. Your thoughts turn homeward. And once again you’re a schoolboy walking through the tall poplar trees. It’s a pleasant memory. More bombs dropping on you from blimps. You got to get it together now. You can’t even look at anybody for fear of some miscalculable thing that might happen. The common grave. There are no other possibilities.

Then you notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this. Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the sun – you see how nature is indifferent to it all. All the violence and suffering of all mankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it.

You’re so alone. Then a piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you’re dead. You’ve been ruled out, crossed out. You’ve been exterminated. I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.

Charlie Poole from North Carolina had a song that connected to all this. It’s called “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me,” and the lyrics go like this:

I saw a sign in a window walking up town one day.
Join the army, see the world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too.
Oh you ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talking to me.
I may be crazy and all that, but I got good sense you see.
You ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talkin’ to me.
Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun.
You ain’t talkin’ to me.

Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson

The Odyssey is a great book whose themes have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of songwriters: “Homeward Bound, “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Home on the Range,” and my songs as well.

The Odyssey is a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war. He’s on that long journey home, and it’s filled with traps and pitfalls. He’s cursed to wander. He’s always getting carried out to sea, always having close calls. Huge chunks of boulders rock his boat. He angers people he shouldn’t. There’s troublemakers in his crew. Treachery. His men are turned into pigs and then are turned back into younger, more handsome men. He’s always trying to rescue somebody. He’s a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of stops.

He’s stranded on a desert island. He finds deserted caves, and he hides in them. He meets giants that say, “I’ll eat you last.” And he escapes from giants. He’s trying to get back home, but he’s tossed and turned by the winds. Restless winds, chilly winds, unfriendly winds. He travels far, and then he gets blown back.

He’s always being warned of things to come. Touching things he’s told not to. There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and on the other you could starve. He goes into the narrow straits with foaming whirlpools that swallow him. Meets six-headed monsters with sharp fangs. Thunderbolts strike at him. Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach for to save himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities. He’s exhausted. He falls asleep, and he’s woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells his story to strangers. He’s been gone twenty years. He was carried off somewhere and left there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel.

In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it.

When he gets back home, things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ‘em. And though he’s greater than them all and the best at everything – best carpenter, best hunter, best expert on animals, best seaman – his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will.

All these stragglers will have to pay for desecrating his palace. He’ll disguise himself as a filthy beggar, and a lowly servant kicks him down the steps with arrogance and stupidity. The servant’s arrogance revolts him, but he controls his anger. He’s one against a hundred, but they’ll all fall, even the strongest. He was nobody. And when it’s all said and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife, and he tells her the stories.

____________________

So what does it all mean? Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these very same themes. And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think he would have worried about it either – what it all means.

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, “The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

http://www.svenskaakademien.se/en/nobel-lecture

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2017. The Nobel Foundation has not obtained the right to assign any usage right to the Nobel Lecture to any third party, and any such rights may thus not be granted. All rights to the Nobel Lecture by Bob Dylan are reserved and the Nobel Lecture may not be published or otherwise used by third parties with one exception: the audio file containing the Nobel Lecture, as published at Nobelprize.org, the official website of the Nobel Prize, may be embedded on other websites

Read also: Blind Willie McTell – Bob Dylan’s Americana and Ahab’s Madness

 

Red lines, red herrings, and Syria’s enduring torment

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading. Here is his assessment of the Khan Sheikhoun gas attack and the US’ “laughably symbolic” response. Contrary to the view of many that Assad did not use sarin gas, and to those who praised Trump’s newfound, muscular foreign policy, Kilcullen maintains that it was indeed Assad wot done it, that his reasons were strategically justified, that the US and its allies need much than this one viagra hit to bring the multifarious warring parties to the negotiating table, and that anyhow, the real target of Trump’s martial signalling were Chinese President Xi and The North Korean Fat Controller, Kim Jong Il. And, perhaps, as Beirut-based correspondent for The Independent, Robert Fisk suggests in his own interpretation of the events, Vladimir Putin:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-syria-air-strike-missile-airbase-chemical-attack-russia-balance-power-bashar-al-assad-a7673166.html

Patrick Cockburn, Fisks’s colleague at at The Imdependent paints a scarier scenario. The folk who brought you the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan are back, and are keen to attend to unfinished business:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-100-days-in-office-foreign-policy-war-air-strikes-syria-afghanistan-north-korea-a7707946.html

Sarin attack shows Assad is desperate as jihadist rebels gain ground

David Kilcullen. The Australian, April 15, 2017

US President Donald Trump’s missile strike against Syria’s Shayrat air base last week, responding to the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun in northern Idlib province, garnered cautious praise across the political spectrum. It also highlighted the complex choices facing the US, allies such as Australia, regional players like Turkey and Iraq, and institutions such as the UN.

The key to understanding the strike, though, lies in a question that’s been somewhat overlooked: why did Bashar al-Assad’s regime need to use the nerve agent in the first place?

We should start by noting that praise for the strike can largely be explained by the extraordinarily low expectations Trump and his predecessor set for effective action on Syria. Trump’s alleged Russia ties, praise for strongmen, positive statements about Assad until days before the attack, and expressed disdain for world opinion set the bar so low that he got credit just for upholding an international norm against chemical weapons, and showing he was prepared to go up against Moscow.

His prompt response also contrasted with president Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his own “red line” after the vastly more lethal Ghouta attack of September 2013, which killed 1500 and poisoned thousands (the Khan Sheikhoun attack killed 74). When Obama called his own bluff on the red line, ceded the diplomatic initiative to Moscow and put the Kremlin in the driver’s seat for negotiations on Syria, he enabled a Russian-brokered agreement on Syria’s chemical stockpile that bolstered the regime’s legitimacy.

Far from eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons — as former national security adviser Susan Rice repeatedly claimed — that agreement left Assad’s regime with reduced but still lethal capability, including extensive supplies of chlorine gas and smaller stocks of nerve agent that it used in later attacks. As Syrians told me after Ghouta, they felt the White House was telling Assad he could go ahead and massacre his own people, provided he did it with barrel bombs and artillery rather than chemicals.

The failure to act after Ghouta so appalled some members of Obama’s cabinet that Democratic “Syria hawks” (including former secretary of state John Kerry) came out in support of last week’s Shayrat strike. Given the continued refusal by many on the left to recognise Trump as America’s duly elected President, this speaks volumes for the level of bipartisan support for decisive action on Syria.

It also highlights the comfort of many progressive interventionists (including Kerry, but also Hillary Clinton) with unilateral American use of force — provided it is sanctified by humanitarian principles such as “responsibility to protect”. All this put Trump’s punitive strike in the political mainstream, making him look positively, well, Clintonian.

The Western narrative on Assad — reinforced just this week by presidential spokesman Sean Spicer — has been that his regime is uniquely evil, uses chemical weapons simply because it can, hates its own people and just wants to burn the country to the ground.

But, in fact, Syrian use of chemical weapons in the war so far has been highly calculated and strategic. Assad’s regime, far from being blind to international condemnation, understands the severe political consequences of using chemical weapons, and only does so when its back is against the wall. Assad’s regime has shown no compunction in using nerve agents when its survival is at stake, but otherwise it mostly keeps chemical weapons as a hip-pocket emergency reserve that can be rapidly deployed when manpower is short.

Thus, the real missed opportunity of 2013 lay in a failure to understand the regime’s motive in using chemical weapons: as a last resort, when a victorious coalition of mostly secular rebel groups was threatening the eastern suburbs of Damascus, making significant gains in the regime’s heartland and jeopardising its survival. Decisive action, combining the measured use of force with a strong diplomatic push, could have forced Assad — given the dire pressure he was under — into genuine peace talks.

The Ghouta attack was not an act of unthinking evil but one of calculated desperation, and strikes against regime positions could have not only punished Assad for his use of gas, but enabled a rebel advance into Damascus that would have opened a path to negotiations. The diplomatic price for suspending air strikes would have been regime concessions in UN-led peace talks, while the internat­ional community would have retained the ability to restart strikes at any time, or impose no-fly zones to enable humanitarian corridors to protect the people.

This, in fact, was the argument that allied airpower experts made at the time, likening the situation to the NATO-led bombing in the Balkans that ended the Bosnian war, led to the Dayton Accords and halted massacres in Kosovo in 1999.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. Remember, 2013 was before Islamic State emerged, before its blitzkrieg dramatically changed the game in Iraq, before the declaration of the caliphate prompted a spike in world terrorism, before Turkey’s military incursions into Iraq and Syria, and before the Eur­opean immigration crisis.

In 2013, the dominant Syrian rebel factions still included secular groups, while jihadists were on the back foot. This was also before Russia’s intervention improved Syrian air defences and complicated targeting by putting Russians on to key regime sites, and before the presence of more than 1500 Western ground troops in Syria made it possible for the regime to easily retaliate. And it was before the Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 brought a flood of funds, advisers and troops from Tehran to further bolster the regime.

Against this background, last week’s strike seems almost laughably symbolic: 60-odd Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from two US navy ships in the Mediterranean, with allied aircraft kept away from Syrian air defences, and the Russians (and thus, presumably, their Syrian proteges) given plenty of warning to get out of the way. The missiles destroyed some obsolete aircraft, killed a few regime troops, and left the airfield at Shayrat so lightly damaged that the regime was using it again within hours, even launching a further strike from Shayrat (with conventional munitions) against Khan Sheikhoun the very next day.

Kosovo 1999 it was not. But again, the key question is why Assad’s forces felt the need to use the nerve agent in the first place.

Khan Sheikhoun is a town of 50,000 on the southern edge of Idlib, a province in northwestern Syria that abuts Turkey to the north, Aleppo to the east, and Hama and Latakia provinces to the south and west. As of mid-April, apart from tiny regime enclaves at Fua and Kefraya, Idlib is almost totally controlled by a jihadist coalition led by al-Qa’ida’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, still widely known by its former name, the Nusra Front.

Nusra detests Islamic State (a feeling Abubakr al-Baghdadi’s organisation heartily reciprocates). But in many ways it poses a much more severe threat to the regime than Baghdadi’s group. The Nusra-led offensive in Idlib and Hama has been under-reported, but for Syrians it’s the most important event of 2017 so far.

Even as the regime recaptured Aleppo in December 2016 — with heavy support from Russian airstrikes, Russian special forces, Iranian advisers and Hezbollah militia — Nusra and other groups formed an alliance, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, to recapture ground from Assad’s forces.

After weeks of preparation they launched a major offensive on March 21 with more than 5000 well-armed and well-organised fighters from seven rebel groups operating under Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Tahrir al-Sham gathered the most capable rebel groups in Syria into a single coalition under al-Qa’ida’s leadership, pointed them directly at the regime’s weakest point and achieved immediate success.

Within days, rebel fighters pushed to within 5km of the Hama suburbs, threatening the regime’s control of a critical city that anchors its northern flank and provides access to Aleppo. They also made significant gains into the al-Ghab plain, Syria’s breadbasket, an area essential to the regime’s ability to feed Syria’s pro-government population.

Nusra’s rapid advance jeopardised Assad’s control of the economically and politically important Hama and Latakia provinces, and posed a risk to Russia’s naval and air bases to the south.

Khan Sheikhoun now sits at the base of a rebel salient that stretches from Idlib south into the outskirts of Hama city, and west into al-Ghab. As I write, this salient is being counter-attacked all along its perimeter by regime forces desperate to stem the Nusra advance, but lacking the manpower or ground-based firepower to roll back the rebels. Knocking out Khan Sheikhoun from the air would immediately collapse the rebel salient, letting the regime stabilise the front line. Unsurprisingly, doing exactly that has become a major priority for Assad.

The town’s importance was underlined by the fact that the pilot who allegedly carried out the sarin attack was Major General Mohammed Hazzouri, a Syrian air force officer commanding the 50th Air Brigade at Shayrat, and whose family name suggests he’s related to Mohammed Abdullah al-Hazzouri, governor of Hama, who was appointed by Assad in November 2016. Obviously, when you launch a gas attack using a fighter jet flown by a two-star general from the same prominent family as the provincial governor, you’re telegraphing that this is a pretty serious priority.

In fact, the town has been heavily attacked by regime forces (including earlier attacks with chemical weapons late last year and again last month) and subjected to multiple air strikes and artillery bombardments as the regime tries to contain the threat to its northern flank. Assad’s reliance on artillery and aircraft underlines his lack of ground assets: despite Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah support, his forces have their hands full consolidating control over Aleppo, trying to relieve the isolated city of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, and fighting on the southern front against other rebel groups.

All this indicates that the regime is again under serious pressure, that its position is far shakier than its propaganda narrative after the recapture of Aleppo might suggest, and that firm pressure now might bring renewed progress toward peace talks. But the situation today is vastly more complicated than in 2013. There are real risks to allied aircraft over Syria from Russian and Syrian air defences, and to special forces and conventional troops (there are now, according to media reporting, as many as 1500 rangers, marines and special forces on the ground in Syria) in the event of strikes against the regime.

The rebels opposing Assad today are not the largely secular forces of 2013 but rather are dominated by al-Qa’ida, while Russia has indicated it plans to further improve Syria’s air defences and has vetoed efforts in the UN for further talks on a Syrian peace deal.

To think that, under these circumstances, mere words — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s frosty visit to Moscow, Trump’s call for Vladimir Putin to stop covering for Assad, or ambassador Nikki Haley’s fiery confrontation with Russian diplomats at the UN — will force Putin to back away from a critical strategic relationship going back to the 1960s, or force Assad to stop throwing everything at an attack that threatens his survival, is fantasy. If the Shayrat strike is to be more than the latest useless symbolic gesture, it needs to be followed by a fundamental change in strategy.

Until a week ago, Trump’s Syria policy was to downplay any call for regime change, acquiesce in the permanence of Assad’s regime and collaborate with Putin against Islamic State. As recently as April 5, the day after the Khan Sheikhoun attack, Tillerson was asserting that Assad was here to stay.

This was bad policy: not just on moral or political grounds (Assad has killed 10 times as many Syrians as Islamic State, and most US partners both inside Syria and throughout the region see removing Assad and ending the war as the top priority bar none) but also in practical military terms.

Assad lacks the military cap­acity to stabilise Syria: he’s losing ground in key areas, controls less than 23 per cent of the country, has no prospect of reunifying Syria, presides over a patchwork of local militias and thuggish warlords with purely nominal allegiance to his government, and couldn’t survive six months without external support.

The use of sarin gas underlines how desperate his situation is. Even if it were morally and politically possible to work with his regime for the greater goal of destroying Islamic State, the man simply can’t do the job.

More fundamentally, the goal of destroying Islamic State may not actually be the higher strategic priority, at least not in Syria. Unlike Iraq, where recapturing Mosul and crushing the caliphate is a key first step toward stabilising the country, in Syria the greatest threat to stability is Assad himself.

For most Syrians I’ve spoken to, the idea that anyone engaged in the uprising since 2011 would sit down again under Assad is ludicrous, and many have told me the biggest winner so far isn’t Islamic State but al-Qa’ida, through its Nusra affiliate.

From a wider strategic standpoint, the other key audiences for the Shayrat strike were Chinese leader Xi Jinping (who was dining with Trump as the strike went in) and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Using the Syria strike to telegraph a zero-tolerance policy for weapons of mass destruction, administration spokesmen talked of a new joint effort with China to rein in North Korea’s nuclear adventurism. For a President who spoke blithely on the campaign trail about Japan and South Korea acquiring their own nuclear weapons to deal with Pyongyang, this represents a big step forward.

More importantly, the move of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier battle group toward Korean waters to deter further missile launches, and the deployment of US air defence systems and special operators in South Korea, showed this was not just talk.

The choices facing President Trump on Syria today are vastly more complex than those president Obama failed to deal with in 2013. But his change of policy after the Khan Sheikhoun attack — perhaps prompted by the presence in his inner circle of experienced strategists such as Secretary of Defence James Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster — shows he’s at least capable of learning and adapting.

Along with the change on Syria policy and the move to deter North Korea, last week’s strike was rapidly followed by shifts in Trump’s tone on China (evidently no longer a currency manipulator), NATO (apparently no longer obsolete) and Russia (it would have been nice to co-operate, but that’s not possible while Russia continues to back Assad). Don’t look now, but all this seems to be pushing the Trump presidency back toward something resembling relatively mainstream US policy in the tradition of presidents Bush, Clinton and Reagan.

Whether you think that’s good or bad probably depends on your view of America’s role in the world, and the longstanding propensity of US leaders to use unilateral military force. But symbolic as it was, the Shayrat missile strike may also open the door to new thinking on Syria — and after six years, half a million dead, dozens of cities destroyed and millions displaced, that can only be a good thing.

David Kilcullen is a former lieutenant-colonel in the Australian Army and was a senior adviser to US general David Petraeus in 2007-08, when he helped to design the Iraq war coalition troop surge. He also was a special adviser for counterinsurgency to former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror (Black Inc).

See also, a prior post featuring David Kilcullen: One, Two, Three, What Are We Fighting For?